Now that Jamboree 2016 is over and I have gotten caught up on some personal matters, I’m making time for some genealogy again. My immediate project is to prepare for an upcoming trip to Michigan where I will have a chance to visit two of my Holladay cousins who have roots in Adair County, Kentucky.

I’m planning to make a few blog posts as I do this work, both to keep me focused and to reconnect with some of my other Holladay cousins who haven’t seen any new posts here for quite a long time. I’m not ready to make any big commitment at this time, but I will try to report at least something each week.

Along the way I’ll write up a bit about the Holladay Family project which I began many years ago and what it has evolved in to. We’ll see how it goes.

The tool that I use to record the results of my genealogy research is a database program called RootsMagic. There are several programs of this type available. Some of them are free or have versions that are free. RootsMagic is my own particular favorite. You can learn more bout this program at their website: http://www.rootsmagic.com/

One of my many volunteer activities at the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS) is serving as the leader of the RootsMagic User Group. We meet on the third Sunday of most months at 2:00 PM at the SCGS Library in Burbank to assist both new and more experienced RM users to learn more about the program and how to use it more effectively. I will post information on this blog for members of the User Group and others interested in the program.

More later – Right now I have to leave in an hour to chair this month’s meeting.

Today is July 14 and I decided to make a short post about my genealogy work. As I have said in earlier posts, I spend a lot of time doing volunteer work at the library of the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS) in Burbank. It is about a 20-minute drive from our home in La Crescenta, and I am over at the library an average of two days a week.

Beginning in the late spring, the hard core of SCGS volunteers begin saying, “I’ll do it after Jamboree”, in response to almost any activity not directly related to Jamboree preparations. For those of you not familiar with the genealogy scene in Southern California, Jamboree is the annual conference sponsored by SCGS that attracts hundreds of attendees from Southern California and all over the west, not to mention visitors from other parts of the country. Jamboree features a three-day program of presentations and workshops by nationally-prominent speakers, together with display and sales booths by major publishers and suppliers of genealogy products. It is the largest such gathering on the West Coast, and this year our attendance was almost 1200 attendees, volunteers, speakers, and exhibitors. You can see more info at: http://genealogyjamboree.com/

At any rate, now it is “After Jamboree” and time to start blogging about my own genealogical activities.

Well, my 2012 New Year’s resolution about this blog didn’t last very long. I do have plenty of potential topics and I really do want to give it another try.

I am finally able to dial back a bit on my volunteer work at the Southern California Genealogical Society because I now have some very talented volunteers sharing the load on the IT work.

Recently I have received useful information and some interesting queries from several Holladay cousins. I also received a plaintive question from one of my “DNA cousins” asking whether this blog was still active. All this has prompted me to make a new attempt at blogging about my genealogical activities.

I’m also inspired by Geoff Rasmussen’s signoff line when he ends one of his excellent webinars: “Life is short – do genealogy first!”

Today I decided to keep one of my New Year’s resolutions and start posting to my genealogy blog again. If I expand the scope a bit, I certainly have plenty of topics to discuss. Let’s see how it goes in the next few days.

Unfortunately, I’ve done very little in the way of research in the past several months. My main activities in the genealogy world have centered on support for the IT department at the Southern California Genealogical Society (SCGS) in Burbank.

One labor of love for me at the SCGS is organizing the RootsMagic software user group. We meet on the third Sunday of most months. The focus of the next meeting will be the newly-released RootsMagic 5 and early user experiences with it. My first order of business is to migrate to the new version from RootsMagic 4 and get some experience with it myself.

Although I have not posted any items during the past year, I have managed to find some time to pursue my genealogical interests. A visit to the National Archives branch in Philadelphia last fall led to the discovery that my Irish immigrant ancestor, John Conroy, was born in County Lough, north of Dublin. A recent trip to the Mississippi Valley gave me a chance to learn more about Zacharias Holladay’s brother John Holladay and his descendants and to visit some of the areas where they lived in Mississippi.

I also enjoyed meeting many Newcomb cousins at a birthday party and family celebration in January, and I met many of my Holladay cousins from Boone County, Kentucky, at an impromptu reunion in April.

At the beginning of this year I became co-administrator for the US part of the Halliday/Holladay Y-DNA Surname Project at FTDNA. This project includes all variants of the Halliday surname, including Holladay, Holliday, and many others. Through this effort I hope to learn more about the ancestors of Zacharias Holladay and their relationship to other early Holladay immigrants to Virginia. More about this work in future posts.

For the moment my genealogy efforts compete for time with volunteer support at the Southern California Genealogical Society. With the successful conclusion of our recent Genealogy Jamboree I’m hoping to find more time for serious genealogy work and for posting to this blog.

Today I posted a page summarizing what I currently know about my great-great-grandfather Zacharias Holladay’s elder brother, John Holladay. Born in Virginia in about 1755, he was one of very early settlers in Kentucky and was at Harrodsburg in March, 1777. After the Revolutionary war, Zacharias joined him in Kentucky. John Holladay apparently died in Adams County, Mississippi, in about 1800, but I am still looking for more solid proof of this.

Since returning from my trip to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, I have been fortunate to locate some living descendants of John and his wife Margaret, or Margery Gustavus. Their descendants use the surname Holliday, and my post also comments on the issue of how our surname is spelled. I am hoping we can verify the genealogical evidence of these relationships by DNA testing.

In the past year I have found some more distant Holliday/Holliday cousins, had a 67-marker Y-DNA test, and verified that indeed I share a common ancestor with them. These findings verify the results many years of genealogical research done by Dr. Alvis M. Holladay, Sr., and his family that were published in his book, The Holladay Family, in 1983.

Can it really be the first of June? My blogging activities have become sporadic again, it seems. Shortly after my last posting I left on a week-long research trip to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, home of The Allen County Public Library (ACPL). This facility is one of the premier genealogical research libraries in the country and claims to be the largest such library that is publicly-funded.

The ACPL certainly lived up to my expectations. My initial goal was to search for clues to the ancestry of Henry Reynolds, one of my “brick wall” great-great grandparents. This effort was moderately successful – some good information was found in Kentucky and Virginia land records about possible members of his family.

A second goal was to look for new information about the Holladay family in the ACPL holdings for Adair County, Kentucky. These holdings are quite impressive, but I found little for Adair that is not available in Salt Lake City and no Holladay information that was new to me.

While there I also looked for new information about Zachariah Holladay’s somewhat mysterious older brother John. Here I was spectacularly successful in learning about his descendants and about the woman he married, Margaret or Margery Gustavus. John is mentioned briefly in my biographical sketch of Zacharias, especially in footnote 3, but much of his life has been a mystery to me, especially what happened after he disappears from Washington County, Kentucky, records in about 1798.

Both during this trip and since my return, this effort to find more information about Zacharias’ brother John Holladay has occupied much of my genealogy time. The trouble is, other priorities and commitments keep me from spending more than one or at most two hours per day on genealogy. I now have two more genealogical projects to pursue in addition to various tasks under what I call the Holladay Family project. These new projects are the search for Henry Reynolds (1778-1849) parents, and developing a biographical sketch of John Holladay (1755-1800). I’ll be commenting on each of these and summarizing results in future posts.

My genealogical efforts have been greatly aided by the fact that all of my father’s ancestors migrated to the area of Adair and Green County, Kentucky, shortly after the Revolutionary War. They remained in the Adair County area until my father left in the 1920’s for Colorado and the West.

The surnames are: Anderson, Brawner, Holladay, Montgomery, Reynolds, Sallee, Smith, and Waggener. The Creel family is also closely associated with several of these families. I will be making a number of posts about these families and sources of additional information about them. Your comments and inquiries are invited.